Quantum strings will always sing
assigned frequencies, set pieces
undergirding all we are below
the threshold of ever knowing
with songs that constrain matter
to the dance of chance and brute
necessity, inert bodies compelled
by contingency, brains of beasts
bullied by what came before, no
foretaste of freedom here where
what is not forbidden, that very
thing required, enforced in times
before the turning, when God’s
honey-voiced servant graced the
Garden and woke new worlds of
choice and shame.
Ah, that siren-serpent
blows jazz notes, riffs
below the threshold of thinking
where blood rises unbidden
and neural circuits
form and bind
strange loops map symbols as Adam sings names
the beasts of field
and birds of air
captured
in the holy dance
of fire and abstraction
by the shade of the forbidden tree that towers mid-garden
stepping lightly
to syncopated serpent-rhythm
looping, loosening, catching
incipient mind finds the symbol for mind
regards itself
staring back, sucked
into consciousness, shatters
the looking glass, falls through the face of infinity
gone the garden, forever
emerging to indeterminacy
with pounding temple and tart aftertaste of awareness
ashamed
at last
Celestial strings sing peaceful themes to a strident world of
autonomous souls
locked in the logic of survival, doubled down in Prisoner’s Dilemma
until sweet
chords call forth our latent angel-nature, carved below the folds
and through
the grooves of growing minds, molded by God and game theory over
eons of anguish
to defy the dictates of Darwin at last, alleluia, and bend the steel
arc of history
by slow degrees toward the peaceable kingdom which exists, surely,
somewhere
incarnated from abstraction in the everyday lives of kindly sinners and sweat-
stained
saints who swing to strings and sax, freed from necessity to fall,
or rise.
